Unable to turn Hibernation on in new Laptop

Lordbob75 said:

It might just be a buggy install.
~Lordbob

What do you mean by "buggy install" .... something I did, or something Samsung did when the set this thing up?

Lordbob75 said:

I mean that when it was installed (by them) something happened and it got messed up. If you have a disc, can you do a repair install?
~Lordbob

No disk ... just the restore partition. For what it is worth, I'm on the phone to Samsung Level 1 and had to educate him as to what true hibernation is ... he "hibernated" his laptop, took the battery out, replaced it, pressed the power button, and the computer, as we'd suspect, did a cold boot -- it was not hibernated. The problem has been escalated.

The Hiberfil.sys hidden system file is located in the root folder of the drive where the operating system is installed. The Windows Kernel Power Manager reserves this file when you install Microsoft Windows. The size of this file is approximately equal to the amount of random access memory (RAM) that is installed on the computer.

The computer uses the Hiberfil.sys file to store a copy of the system memory on the hard disk when the hybrid sleep setting is turned on. If this file is not present, the computer cannot hibernate.

Hibernation is made unavailable when you set the value of the Hibernate after setting to Never by using the Power Options item in Control Panel. To make hibernation unavailable, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, and then type cmd in the Start Search box.
2. In the search results list, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as Administrator.
3. When you are prompted by User Account Control, click Continue.
4. At the command prompt, type powercfg.exe /hibernate off, and then press ENTER.
5. Type exit, and then press ENTER.

To make hibernation available, follow these steps:

1. Click Start, and then type cmd in the Start Search box.
2. In the search results list, right-click Command Prompt, and then click Run as Administrator.
3. When you are prompted by User Account Control, click Continue.
4. At the command prompt, type powercfg.exe /hibernate on, and then press ENTER.
5. Type exit, and then press ENTER to close the Command Prompt window.

Have not heard from Samsung re: problem escalation. But yesterday was a US holiday, so maybe today.

Re: the detailed steps offered by pcs3657 ...

(1) Power button definitions (for now, same for "on battery" and "plugged in"
(2) When I press power button: shut down
(3) When I press sleep button: sleep
(4) When I close lid: hibernate

Settings for "My Custom Plan 1" (On Battery / Plugged in)
(1) Dim the Display (15 minutes / Never)
(2) Turn off display (30 minutes / Never)
(c) Put the computer to sleep (45 minutes / Never)
(4) Adjusted the brightness (both sliders in the middle)

Advanced Power Settings 9 (Pop up window)
Sleep: sleep after on battery (45 minutes); Plugged in (never)
Allow Hybrid sleep on battery (OFF) Plugged on (OFF)
Hibernate after on battery (45 minutes) Plugged in (NEVER)
Allow wake timers (both OFF)
Power buttons and Lid ... all the same as per the GUI above

Executed the powercfg.exe /hibernate on command from the command prompt window while in administrator mode.

TESTS

(1) Shut lid on laptop. This should have caused the machine to go into standard hibernation. (Remember, I specified the same actions with battery power and power cable plugged in). It took about 31 seconds for the disk activity indicator LED to quick blinking, and the machine was down. Only the "charging" light was on. No further disk activity. And what activity there was, was at about 50% duty cycle. In my experience on other laptops and my 4GB desktop, standard hibernation takes about 2-3 minutes to spool the entire 4GB of RAM to the hyberfil.sys file in the root of the system drive. When I opened up the system and pressed the power button, it took about 20 seconds to resume full operating state.

(2) Pressed "sleep" button (on this system, it is Function key + ESC). It took about 6 seconds to enter sleep mode. There is a special indicator light for sleep mode, and it was ON. Pressed power button to resume. Took about 5 seconds to be fully operational.

(3) Pressed Power button to shut down. Took about 10 seconds. Pressed power button to get a cold boot. Took about 70 seconds.

(4) Clicked on a hibernation icon I have on the laptop desktop (it executes rundll32.exe, which runs powerprof.dll.SetSuspendState 0.1.0 ... documented in these forums and elsewhere on the internet). Identical shutdown and restart experience as when I closed the laptop lid.

(5) I just opened up my Netbook (Windows 7/Home, 32-bit), observed the "normal" progress bar as it resumed operation from hibernation (have never seen this indicator on my new laptop), and using Windows Explorer (or whatever it may be called these days) observer that I indeed had the hiberfil.sys file in the root system drive directory.

CONCLUSION
I think I am going into sleep hibernation when I really want to go into full hibernation.

Make sure your drivers particularly the display driver and the network driver are updated.

I could turn the laptop totally off and on (resulting in a "cold" boot), I could put it in "sleep" mode ("standby" mode in XP), and I could put it in "sleep hibernation" … however, I could not get total "hibernation" mode to work.

I spent several hours with Samsung Tier1 and Tier2 support, without results. I would make it "hibernate", let it settle down (usually takes about 10-15 seconds until all activity lights were extinguished), remove the battery, and when I started the machine up after battery replacement, it would cold boot to a fresh state. Not the desired result.

So, after giving up on Samsung support, I took it to Geek Squad at BestBuy … after about 10 minutes, a guy came up who knew how to fix it. And it was simple.

There is a power savings feature in Windows 7 that makes the disk stop spinning after a predetermined period of time … my machine was setup with a somewhat long time. When you "hibernated" it apparently wrote the RAM contents rather quickly, and, if you powered up again, the disk would still be spinning (although the disk indicator light was extinguished), and the boot program, seeing a spinning disk, decides to do a cold boot.

The solution: change the power savings feature so that the disk quits spinning in a much shorter time. In this case, we set it to one minute. As a test, I opened up for applications on my desktop, went into hibernation, removed the battery, and then "kicked the tires" throughout the store for about 30 minutes. Upon returning to the Geek Squad desk, I reinstalled the battery, pressed the power button, and it restored the system to the state before hibernation: that is, the four application windows were still opened on the desktop.

The Geek Squad guy says that this behavior is not limited to Samsung laptops, but affects all other Win 7 computers.

Of interest is that I cannot find hiberfil.sys in the C:/ root directory. If it is there, it is hidden, and I can't figure out how to unhide it.

Also, I have a Netbook (Windows 7 Home/32-bit) that uses SSD instead of a rotating disk; I've never had hibernation problems with it … but then, that is an entirely different kind of mass storage system.

I must confess that I overlooked two significant issues:

(1) You can not have full hibernation and sleep hibernation at the same time: you have to have one or the other, but not both.

(2) When you are looking for hiberfil.sys in the system drives root directory, it is so helpful to NOT hide "protected system files" .... finding that switch is not as easy as it was on Windows XP; indeed, I found it only via the "help" feature (Start > Help and Support). When they are not hidden, you see hiberfil.sys as a 4GB file (as you expected it to be).

So for all of you folks whose time I wasted, I'm truly sorry.